Viz speaks!

Start your reading today at ICv2, where their two-part interview with Viz brass touches on the state of the manga market (better than last year), the problem of kids’ manga, the renewed popularity of shoujo, their “aggressive” push to digital, and some books to look forward to in the fall, including the old and new volumes of Loveless. And here’s VP of publishing Leyla Aker on why Viz is going beyond parent companies Shueisha and Shogakukan for licenses:

When Tokyopop was a major force in licensing and Go! Comi, Bandai, and the smaller publishers were around, we really didn’t go to a lot of publishers because it was more of an effort to secure those licenses in competition with the other publishers, and we didn’t really need to. Our parent companies’ catalogs were so deep there wasn’t a huge impetus to go out to try to find other stuff. But now the publishing landscape here has changed so much, where there’s essentially only a handful of players left, the field is more open so when we are looking to acquire material, the editors know that they should be looking everywhere. It’s kind of an organic process of just going further afield.

News from Japan: A local group has asked the Hiroshima Board of Education not to use Keiji Nakasawa’s Barefoot Gen in its peace studies program, calling the semi-autobiographical tale of a boy who survived the Hiroshima bombing “one-sided.” Eikichi Onizuka, the title character in GTO, will make an appearance in a one-shot spinoff of Inohead Gargoyle, the latest series by GTO creator Tohru Fujisawa, in Young magazine. The manga team Peach-Pit (Shugo Chara!, Rozen Maiden) has a new manga in the works that will run in Kodansha’s Dessert.Happy Hustle High creator Rie Takada will launch a new series, Boku no Kanojo wa Yōjinbō (My Girlfriend is a Yojimbo/Bodyguard), in the September 3 issue of Silky. ANN has the Japanese publisher rankings for the first half of 2012, plus a bit of analysis.